Internet is a packet switched data network. Internet is also known as “World Wide Web”.
A contact center is a place where are located many agents to received and to answer communications from callers. Each agent is equipped with an endpoint to receive and answer the communication. An endpoint is the name for the entity on one end of a transport layer connection. Here the endpoint is embodied as a telecommunication endpoint like a phone handset, a mailer application or a chat application or any other kind of telecommunication endpoints that form a user-machine interface to communicate through Internet with a contact center agent. When the endpoint is a phone handset, the contact center is known as “call center”. The caller is also equipped with an endpoint to transmit and receive information through Internet.
A communication can be addressed to the contact center through the use of the contact center URL (Uniform Resource Locator). The contact center has only one URL or a number of URLs than can answer to a communication. This or these URLs are used to route communications to an “entry point” of the contact center. Each time a communication is addressed to the contact center, this communication has to be routed from the entry point to the adequate agent's endpoint within the contact center.
“Communication over Internet” encompasses any exchange or transfer of information through Internet between an agent, within a contact center, and a caller. For example, a communication over Internet may be a phone call or a video conference between an agent and a caller endpoints linked to each other through Internet. In this last case, the communication over Internet is also known as voice over IP (Internet Protocol) or “VoIP”. The communication over Internet may also be a transfer of emails between the agent and the caller or a chat over Internet.
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) must be used to address a communication to a desired endpoint over Internet. The URL contains a contact center network address that allows to route the communication to the desired entry point of the contact center through Internet. The contact center network address is an IP address or any information that can be converted into an IP address such as a domain name. Typically, the URL starts with a scheme name and is followed by a hostname. For example, the scheme name is “mailto:” or “sip:”. The hostname may be a combination of a host's local name with its parent domain's name. For example, the URL has the following format when SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is used to communicate over Internet:                Sip: xxx@yyy.zzz        where:                    xxx is a user name,            yyy.zzz is a hostname, and            zzz is an extension.                        
“xxx” et “yyy” are character strings. “zzz” is a predetermined extension like “.com”, “.fr”, “.eu”, “.gov” and so on. This format is very similar to the one of email address.
The hostname is a network address.
A contact center is equipped to handle a large volume of communications, especially for taking orders or servicing customers. Conventionally, a contact center has many contact center agents, each agent being provided with an endpoint to receive or answer communication. Contact center agents can be grouped according to their competence or skills.
The applicant knows a method to route a communication from a caller from an entry point of the contact center to a specific endpoint in a contact center. The method comprises:                displaying a hypertext link on a caller endpoint, the hypertext link containing a contact center URL (Uniform Resource Locator) to route a communication to the contact center over Internet,        upon selection of the hypertext link by a caller, addressing a communication to the contact center using the contact center URL contained in the hypertext link,        upon reception of this communication at the contact center, routing the communication from the entry point to the specific endpoint among a plurality of different endpoints of the contact center able to receive this communication.        
When such a hypertext links triggers a call when selected, it is also known as “Clik-to-Call” hypertext link.
In this context, it is desirable to route the call to a specific endpoint of an agent competent to answer the particular needs of the caller. Several methods have been proposed to meet this desire in the context of call centers.
In a first proposed method, the need of the caller is deduced from the composed phone number. Thus, the call center has to be configured with several different phone numbers. At each phone number is associated a specific agent skill. This method suffer of the drawback that many phone numbers are used. In addition, the management of such a call center may become complex if an agent has several skills.
A second method consists in directly writing the phone number of the suitable agent in the hypertext link. This supposes that each agent has a direct phone number. Many direct phone numbers are not always available. Furthermore, it is then necessary to implement specific procedure to handle situations like a busy or absent agent.
A third method is to identify the needs of a caller from the calling phone number. For example, a server searches in a database, the needs associated with the calling phone number and then routes the call according to the identified needs. However many problems may arise. For example, a same calling phone number may be used by different callers having different needs. On the contrary, a same caller may use different calling phone numbers.
A fourth method is to connect each call to a voice machine that will ask the caller to specify his needs. Once the caller needs are identified, the routing of the call to a specific agent is performed based on the identified needs.